Novel Excerpt: “Under a Fairy Moon”
by: T. Wallace-Pregent
Addyson Marten crouched stone-still in the speckled shadows, willing herself to become nothing but rock and tree and cold bare earth. Then, only when the woman had moved a little farther on and there was only a slim chance of being seen, Addy began to breathe freely again, blood moving again to warm her limbs. The woman was Mrs.Tavish, and they had recently become neighbors in the small town of Windy Falls.
Addy was in awe of Mrs. Tavish. Or rather, she was in awe of her garden, and her reputation. Mrs. Tavish had the most beautiful garden in the neighborhood – some said in the entire county. It perfumed the street with its exotic smells and its sheer number of plants rendered it a sort of urban jungle. Addy thought it looked like a fairyland with its fancy pagodas and mythical statuary.
This was why she was so puzzled: you would think that Mrs. Tavish’s garden would have been the pride of the town – even a tourist attraction. You would imagine that children would come in droves to touch its flowers; you would think that amateur gardeners from around the country would come to gaze at its lush beauty and press its owner for tips on how to manage such a paradise. In fact, just the opposite was true. Children and adults avoided the place like it was a hidden minefield ready to blow. They took great pains to cross the street rather than walk over its adjacent sidewalk – refusing even to take refuge from its shady canopy on a scorching summer day. What was it about Mrs. Tavish’s garden that people feared so much?
Addy wondered if it was perhaps Mrs. Tavish herself that so frightened the townspeople of Windy Falls. She remembered people talking about a strange old lady in Port Perry where she grew up. She had a house full of cats and grew herbs and some of the kids thought she might be a witch. Was Mrs. Tavish a witch? Certainly she was the picture of contradiction tramping ungracefully around her kingdom of azaleas and primroses in her cotton flowered dresses and black wellington boots. However, Addy didn’t think she looked so much scary as ridiculous. She didn’t think a witch would wear an over-large sun-hat trailing ribbons and lace.
“Rita said to be very careful not to upset our new neighbor,” said her Mom offhandedly to her Dad a few days after they had moved in to the new house. “She’s a bit eccentric, apparently, and there’s some scandal there, though she didn’t go into details. Something about a lost child – maybe her own. Anyway, she’s a real loner and doesn’t like people, so we’ll just have to give her some space.”
Addy had wanted to ask her more about Mrs. Tavish, but she was too comfortable in her place behind the heavy living-room drapes, feeling the cold smoothness of the tiled floor and imagining she was exploring the dark patches in the forest she saw in the painting on the mantelpiece. Her father was partly responsible for her day-dreaming. He was playing the piano softly in the background and the music was carrying her thoughts away as it always did, to uncharted lands.
